A Dream of Wolves: A Novel

Author of the critically acclaimed novels, A Brother's Blood and The Blind Side of the Heart, Michael C. White weaves a brilliant tale of one man's struggle to reconcile the beckoning nostalgia of the past with the allure of a hopeful future, while carving out a livable niche in the present.

A transplanted Yankee, Dr. Stuart Jordan has settled amidst the rugged beauty of the southern Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. He lives a quiet, small-town life where locals call him "Doc." By day Doe runs an OB/GYN practice, delivering babies into the world and warmly tending to their mothers, but by night he moonlights as the town's medical examiner, as he puts it, "working the other end of the line." Since the tragic death of his son fourteen years earlier, Doe has been willing to lose himself in the daily rhythms of his job and of the mountains and its people. Yet he can't let go of the past, a past which includes Annabel, his estranged, mentally ill wife. Driven by drugs, alcohol, and her own raging demons, she floats in and out of his life like a drifter, wreaking havoc and leaving nothing but painful memories each time she disappears. Knowing that divorce would be the best answer for both of them, Doc, however, can never quite bring himself to abandon the woman he once so dearly loved. Instead, he loses himself in his work, hoping to numb his pain.

But his quiet life is about to be rudely jolted. One night he is called to the scene of a brutal murder and unknowingly comes across three people who will forever change his fate: Rosa Littlefoot, a young Native American woman who has gunned down her abusive lover; her victim, Roy Lee Pugh, a white man related to a violent hill-dwelling clan; and their baby daughter, Maria. Facing arrest and separation from her daughter, Rosa refuses to hand over her baby safely until she extracts a promise from Doe to see to it that her child is cared for while she's in jail. He agrees for the child's sake. With this one promise, Doe is slowly but forcefully drawn into a tangled web of lives ripe with conflict and passion -- those of Rosa and her baby, the backwoods Pugh clan, and Bobbie Tisdale, the local D.A., a beautiful woman who has recently become Doe's lover. There is also the secret Rosa shares with no one. Finally, there is the haunting presence of Annabel. Suddenly thrust into this world of treachery, deceit, and love, Doe finds his heart struggling to embrace an uncertain future and realizes he must fight the battle he has been avoiding all these years.

At times charmingly sweet, at times tensely thrilling, and always emotionally riveting, A Dream of Wolves is a powerful and engaging novel that winds and weaves its way through the bitter struggles and uplifting victories of life.

Michael White's previous novels include the New York Times Notable Book A Brother's Blood as well as The Garden of Martyrs and Soul Catcher, both Connecticut Book of the Year finalists. He is the director of Fairfield University's MFA program in creative writing, and lives in Connecticut.